THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE AT DIRE DAWA UNIVERSITY
on My VSO Ethiopian Adventures (Ethiopia), 06/Mar/2012 15:40, 34 days ago
AdmissionIf you are a‘freshman’, yes that includes the girls, (although only an average of 35% of undergraduate students in Ethiopia are females), you start a few weeks after your continuing student colleagues. You are likely to have been allocated a place at a university by the Ministry of Education, and althoughyou will have had an opportunity to express a preference for where you what to go to study, this is likely to have made little difference. You are likely to be able to influence the situation if your parents are wealthy (readers will get the idea I’m sure) and/or if you are very bright and want tostudy a subject in a university that you have expressed a preference for has a place. The system is completely centralised and although the 9 longer established universities in Ethiopia can influence who they accept through applying minimum entry requirements, the Ministry of Education at the present time has full control over the intakes at the majority of the other 13 very new universities across the country. Indeed, it is even possible that you have been told which subject you will study if your grades have been mediocre, you have no particular strength in one subject and have not expressed a strong preference.The subjects offered at university are likely to be similar across the nation, depending on resources, the university’s development record and areas of intended specialisation. For example DDU does not offer agriculture based subjects as there are no resources or expertise for this, but the neighbouring university offers a specialisation in this subject area as it started as an agricultural college. Thus clearlyif you want to study agriculture and show an aptitude for this, you will not be sent to DDU. However, if you want to study engineering, you may well be sent here as Dire Dawa is aspiring to become a centre of excellence in Engineering and Technology .Arriving at the universityHaving come from a different part of the country, on arrival in Dire Dawa in October you find the conditions are trying. Being semi-desert the climate is unlike most of the rest of the country and in October it is still very hot. In addition the campus conditions will require some resilience in those early weeks. The campus is just one sprawling building site and there is dust everywhere, including on every chair you sit at and table you lean on, every breath you take, to say nothing about the state of your feet, shoes and clothes as you walk around. The conditions will be tiring even if you are young.You are allocated to basic dormitory accommodation, and as much of the student accommodation is still not complete, this could be temporary accommodation and is likely to be very cramped. As with the rest of the campus, the limited supply of water will restrict the ablution facilities, although priority is given to students. The standard of these facilities may not be what you have been used to if you came from a reasonable Ethiopian family house, and the sharing of what is available will affect the standard very rapidly. Again, I think readers will get the idea!The induction process for the 2500 new students will be limited to essential information and will focus briefly on timetables, classes and subjects. There are student clubs for you to join although many of these will not have started up at the beginning of the academic year and may take some time to get organised.As the teaching and learning across the country at university is conducted in English, you are likely to struggle if your English is not strong enough to allow you the ease of understanding for academic study. As female students are allowed university entrance with lower grades to encourage an increasing female participation rate, this can lead to a language problems amongst the girls. There is an English Club which will enable to you to improve your language skills. However, English is only spoken for teaching and learning purposes, so as soon as you are out of the classroom, you will revert to……what? Students come from all over the country and in Ethiopia there are 80 different spoken languages and at least 4 main ones. Although Amharic is the official language, and spoken in Dire Dawa, if you come from a different region you may not speak Amharic as well as English. This is a challenging situation for both staff and students.The university provides your meals free of charge and these are served in a large shed at long tables. The food is very basic and traditional, (injera with everything) which is what you like but it could be of a better quality you feel. It is prepared in a massive shed at the back of the refectory by an army of women and everything is done manually, with little in the way of mechanisation. The sight of 20 women sitting on their haunches peeling a small mountain of onions is fascinating to see.The shed is big enough to look a little like an aircraft hanger, where you queue in long lines, often way out of the door and across the dusty areas in the heat of the sun. Somehow the queues move quickly which is important at breakfast time as your first lecture starts at 7.45am. However, you can be pretty certain that your teacher will be late and that if you are late, so be it, and he, or possibly, but far less likely she, is unlikely to say anything.Teaching, Learning and AssessmentYou are likely to have around 4 hours of lectures a day and as there is little in the way of student managed learning tasks or groupwork given to students by staff, you have quite a lot of‘free’ time. However continuous assessment ensures that you keep studying your lecture notes and reading your prescribed text book in the library. The library will contain a range of textbooks on your subject, many of which are sourced from Indian publishers and thus writers. You take copious notes from your lectures in a small A5 notebook which is the only thing you carry around with you to every class. You will be very dependant on your teachers, or ‘instructors’ for most of the information on your subject through lectures, as there are limited internet facilities and the speed of these and computer availability will make internet searching a very time consuming and frustrating business. You know that investment in IT is progressing rapidly nationally and internet connectivity will be a positive aid to your education in the future. A positive addition to text resources is thee-book library which is downloaded for you and available through library based computers.In the centre of town there is also a small and rather quaint library where again most of the space is given over to desks allowing people to study and write. A reasonable selection of books are kept in a cramped room next door and categorised by the main academic areas of study. Many of the people using this facility will be university students.As you walk across the campus to your classroom you pass a herd of goats and four of the campus dogs, and just over there are 3 donkeys grazing in the shade of a small tree.In your school education you are likely to have experienced predominantly rote learning, in cramped, crowded classrooms with few resources. The use of chalk on blackboard will have been key to collecting written information. Thus you expect this approach to continue at university and in large basic, dusty lecture halls, or bare, box like concrete and dusty teaching rooms equipped only with a blackboard and chalk and basic wooden chairs, you are likely to receive 50 minute lectures sitting attentively and passively throughout and taking notes from the blackboard straight into your small and by now rather tatty looking notebook. Increasingly, the teacher does give you some active learning to do in the class and usually this involves being asked to work in a small group on a task for 15 minutes or so. It will also involve questions and answers, although you can usually avoid getting involved if you do not want to.It would be nice if there was an opportunity for more practical learning outside the classroom but you realise that the university does not as yet have laboratory/workshop facilities. You know that 2nd year biology students have recently been on a field trip and are able to use a biology lab at the local high school, and Sports Science students are able to get onto a pitch at some stage even though the university has little in the way of sports facilities. In fact at a recent intra-varsity national competition held at Bahir Dar, Dire Dawa students won 4 medals in athletics! You often see students studying Surveying working in small groups with specialised equipment across the campus. As you are doing language you feel it would be good to have access to a laboratory with some electronic equipment. You believe that there is a language lab but that it doesn’t work and is not used currently. You know that a subject like Business and Management is taught predominantly from a theoretical point of view and as yet the university has little or no contact with employing organisations in the local area, although DD does have a range of industrial organisations, eg a large cement works, Coca-Cola bottling and distribution plant, textile company and Food Complex, as well as branches of insurance companies and banks. It also supports a small number of tourist standard hotels and restaurants. It also hosts the organisation, funded by the EU and tasked with rehabilitating the abandoned national railway line which was the reason for Dire Dawa’s original existence. In addition it has a large local government administrative role, being a regional capital and the second town of the country with over 300,000 population.The specialised equipment needed to teach Engineering and Technology subjects is distributed nationally to universities by the Ministry of Education in Addis Ababa. The funding to procure this expensive specialised equipment is likely to have come from the World Bank.Your notes carry the key information on which you will be assessed. You know that there is a national requirement for 50% continuous assessment so you understand that your teachers will be giving you a series of quizzes and tests at the end of most classes based directly on what has just been taught. You also know that the intention from this policy is for them to identify students at an early stage who need remedial support, particularly in the first year. Thus it is doubly important that you attend your classes as you don’t know which ones will carry assessment tasks that will be marked. Final exams take place at the end of each of the 2 semesters, also counting for 50% of your total mark. These exams are not usually essays and consist mainly of a mix of MCQs, gaps to complete, calculations if that is appropriateand questions requiring short open answers. They last for 2-3 hours. The teachers all invigilate, as well as mark and grade over this period which is demanding for them.The grading system is a complex and time consuming process and in the first semester greater leniency is applied to first years, taking university exams for the first time. Staff are expected to ensure that all first years have been brought up to the same standard by the end of the year. The range of educational, social and family backgrounds of the students makes this particularly challenging and there is a growing divide between students from urban and rural backgrounds.Free timeYou walk a long way across the campus to find a soft drink at the student café and meet a few friends and sit in the shade.Because of the heat, no classes take place between 12noon and 2.30pm, but it is quite likely that you will have evening classes after 5.30pm and also on Saturdays.At the end of day you like to go with friends up the road to the Orthodox church, so you put on your white shawl, whether male or female and walk and chat. This is a great time of the day as the sun is setting and the road is full of students doing the same thing. For the many Muslims there are several local to satisfy their spiritual needs and duty.There is a campus curfew of 9pm when everyone is expected to be back in their dormitories. There are no real areas or facilities for socialising or even for working together in small groups, so you do what you can with what you have. Until curfew you are free to go into town, but with limited money, this may be for a beer only. You are aware that students from more wealthy backgrounds will not live on campus in the dormitories and rent rooms in the town.There are a lot of public holidays during the year, both religious (Orthodox Christian and Muslim) and secular but as these are mainly only one day, including Christmas, it is impossible for you to make the long journey across the country by line taxi or bus to home, so you stay on campus. Christmas is approaching and you know that the large cow that has been grazing on the campus for the last 3 days is destined to be killed to provide Christmas meal for the students and staff working on the campus as a celebration. You look forward to being able to travel to your home during the 3 week semester break in February- March.Employment after universityYou worry about finding a job at the end of your course in 3 years time and realise that the Government, the main source of employment in the country, offers jobs to the students with the best results. Otherwise you could be left with little or no opportunities for employment. As jobs are allocated you may find yourself doing something you really don’t want to do. With the expansion of education there is currently a big demand for teachers and a lot of university graduates are sent into teaching even if they do not want to become a teacher. The other reason why this is difficult to refuse is that this offsets the cost of your education and that if you refuse the position you are expected to pay towards the cost of your education.You know that 80 out of the 350 teachers at DDU this year are new teachers straight from university without any teacher training or working experience. However, you do not question this as it is normal practice. You are aware that after 2-3 years they will be sent to one of the accredited universities‘to do their Masters’ and will be away for as long as that takes. This is resulting in serious staff shortages at the university currently as 200 staff members are currently away for study purposes and this puts enormous workload pressure on the remaining staff.Despite the initial challenges you are settling down well, adjusting to the conditions, enjoying your course and making friends. It is more difficult for girls as there are deeply embedded gender issues in this culture and society and the new experience of university life brings a lot of conflict and pressure. This will be discussed in a future blog.